Collected Essays (33 page)

Suppose you think of an organism as being like a computer graphic that is generated from some program. Or think of an oak tree as being the output of a program that was contained inside the acorn. The genetic program is in the DNA molecule. Your software is the abstract information pattern behind your genetic code, but your actual wetware is the physical DNA in a cell.

Genetic engineers are improving on methods to tinker with the DNA of living cells to make organisms which are in some part artificial. Most commercially sold insulin is in fact created by gene-tailored cells. The word
wetware
is sometimes used to stand for the information in the genome of a biological cell. Wetware is like software, but its in a watery living environment. The era of wetware programming has only just begun.

Robots

In this section we compare science fiction dreams of robots to robots as they actually exist today. We also talk a bit about how computer science techniques may help us get from today’s realities to tomorrow’s dreams.

Science fiction Robots

Science fiction is filled with robots that act as if they were alive. Existing robots already possess such life-like characteristics as sensitivity to the environment, movement, complexity, and integration of parts. But what about reproduction? Could you have robots which build other robots?

A robot that reproduces by (a) using a blueprint to (b) build a copy of itself, and then (c) giving the new robot a copy of the blueprint. (Drawing by David Povilaitis.)

The idea is perhaps surprising at first, but there’s nothing logically wrong with it. As long as a robot has an exact blueprint of how it is constructed, it can assemble the parts for child robots, and it can use a copying machine to give each child its own blueprint so that the process can continue. For a robot, the blueprint is its genome, and its body and behavior is its phenome. In practice, the robots would not use paper blueprints, but might instead use CAD/CAM (computer aided design and manufacturing) files.

The notion of robot A-Life interests me so much that I’ve written several science fiction novels about it. As will be discussed in a section below, The Hacker and the Ants talks about how one might use a Virtual Reality world in which to evolve robots.

In Software, some robots are sent to the moon where they build factories to make robot parts. They compete with each other for the right to use the parts (natural selection), and then they get together in pairs (sex) to build new robots onto which parts of the parents’ programs are placed (self-reproduction). Soon they rebel against human rule, and begin calling themselves boppers. Some of them travel to Earth to eat some human brains—just to get the information out of the tissues, you understand.

In Wetware, the boppers take up genetic engineering and learn how to code bopper genomes into fertilized human eggs, which can then be force-grown to adult size in less than a month. The humans built the boppers, but now the boppers are building people—or something like people.

At the end of Wetware, the irate humans kill off the boppers by infecting their silicon chips with a biological mold, but in Freeware, the boppers are back, with flexible plastic bodies that don’t use chips anymore. The “freeware” of the title has to do with encrypted personality patterns that some aliens are sending across space in search of bodies to live upon.

In my most recent book of this series, Realware, the humans and boppers obtain a tool for creating new “realware” bodies solely from software descriptions of them.

Real Robots

After such heady science fiction dreams, it’s discouraging to look at today’s actual robots. These machines are still very lacking in adaptability, which is the ability to function well in unfamiliar environments. They can’t walk and/or chew gum at the same time.

The architecture for most experimental robots is something like this: you put a bunch of devices in a wheeled can, wire the devices together, and hope that the behavior of the system can converge on a stable and interesting kind of behavior.

What kind of devices go in the can? Wheels and pincers with exquisitely controllable motors, TV cameras, sonar pingers, microphones, a sound-synthesizer, and some computer microprocessors.

The phenome is the computation and behavior of the whole system—it’s what the robot does. The robot’s genome is its blueprint, with all the interconnections and the switch-settings on the devices in the wheeled garbage can, and if any of those devices happens to be a computer memory chip, then the information on the chips is part of the genome as well.

Traditionally, we have imagined robots as having one central processing unit, just as we have one central brain. But in fact a lot of our information processing is down out in our nerve ganglia, and some contemporary roboticists are interested in giving a separate processor to each of a robot’s devices.

This robot design technique is known as subsumption architecture. Each of an artificial ant’s legs, for instance, might know now to make walking motions on its own, and the legs might communicate with each other in an effort to get into synch. Just such an ant (named Atilla) has been designed by Rodney Brooks of MIT. Brooks wants his robots to be cheap and widely available.

Another interesting robot was designed by Marc Pauline of the art-group known as Survival Research Laboratories. Pauline and his group stage large, dadaist spectacles in which hand-built robots interact with each other. Pauline is working on some new robots which he calls Swarmers. His idea is to have the Swarmers radio-aware of each other’s position, and to chase each other around. The idea is to try to find good settings so as give the Swarmers maximally chaotic behavior.

In practice, developing designs and software for these machines is what is known as an intractable problem. It is very hard to predict how the different components will interact, so one has to actually try out each new configuration to see how it works. And commonly, changes are being made to the hardware and to the software at the same time, so the space of possible solutions is vast.

Telerobotics

For many applications, the user might not need a robot to be fully autonomous. Something like a remotely operated hand that you use to handle dangerous materials is like a robot, in that it is a complicated machine which imitates human motions. But a remote hand does not necessarily need to have much of an internal brain, particularly if all it has to do is to copy the motions of your real hand. A device like a remote robot hand is called a telerobot.

Radioactive waste is sometimes cleaned up using telerobots that have video cameras and two robotic arms. The operator of such a telerobot sees what it sees on a video screen, and moves his or her hands within a mechanical harness that send signals to the hands of the telerobot.

I have a feeling that, in the coming decades, telerobotics is going to be a much more important field than pure robotics. People want amplifications of themselves more than they want servants. A telerobot projects an individual’s power. Telerobots would be useful for exploration, travel, and sheer voyeurism, and could become a sought-after high-end consumer product

But even if telerobots are more commercially important than self-guiding robots, there is still a need for self-guiding robots. Why? Because when you’re using a telerobot, you don’t want to have to watch the machine every second so that the machine doesn’t do something like get run over by a car, nor do you want to worry about the very fine motions of the machine. You want, for instance, to be able to say “walk towards that object” without having to put your legs into a harness and emulate mechanical walking motions—this means that, just like a true robot, the telerobot will have to know how to move around pretty much on its own.

Evolving Robots

I think Artificial Life is very likely to be a good way to evolve better and better robots. In order to make the evolution happen faster, it would be nice to be able to do it as a computer simulation—as opposed to the building of dozens of competing prototype models.

My most novel,
The Hacker and the Ants
, is based on the idea of evolving robots by testing your designs out in Virtual Reality—in, that is, a highly realistic computer simulation with some of the laws of physics built into it.

You might, for instance, take a CAD model of a house, and try out a wide range of possible robots in this house without having to bear the huge expense of building prototypes. As changing a model would have no hardware expense, it would be feasible to try out many different designs and thus more rapidly converge on an optimal design.

There is an interesting relationship between A-Life, Virtual Reality, robotics, and telerobotics. These four areas fit neatly into Table 3, which is based on two distinctions: firstly, is the device being run by a computer program or by a human mind; and, secondly, is the device a physical machine or a simulated machine?

Four Kinds of Computer Science

Artificial Life deals with creatures whose brains are computer programs, and these creatures have simulated bodies that interact in a computer-simulated world. In Virtual Reality, the world and the bodies are still computer-simulated, but at least some of the creatures in the world are now being directly controlled by human users. In robotics, we deal with real physical machines in the real world that are run by computer programs, while in telerobotics we are looking at real physical machines that are run by human minds. Come to think of it, a human’s ordinary life in his or her body could be thought of as an example of telerobotics: a human mind is running a physical body!

Memes

In the wider context of the history of ideas, one can observe that certain kinds of fads, techniques, or religious beliefs behave in some ways like autonomous creatures which live and reproduce. The biologist Richard Dawkins calls these thought-creatures
memes
.

Self-replicating memes can be brutally simple. Here’s one:

The Laws of Wealth:

Law I: Begin giving 10% of your income to the person who teaches you the Laws of Wealth.

Law II: Teach the Laws of Wealth to ten people!

The Laws of Wealth meme is the classic Ponzi pyramid scheme. Here’s another self-replicating idea system:

System X:

Law I: Anyone who does not believe System X will burn in hell;

Law II: It is your duty to save others from suffering.

Of System X, Douglas Hofstadter remarks, “Without being impious, one may suggest that this mechanism has played some small role in the spread of Christianity.”

Most thought memes use a much less direct method of self-reproduction. Being host to a meme-complex such as, say,
the use of language
can confer such wide survival advantages that those infected with the meme flourish. There are many such memes with obvious survival value: the tricks of farming, the craft of pottery, the arcana of mathematics—all are beneficial mind-viruses that live in human information space.

Memes which confer no obvious survival value are more puzzling. Things like tunes and fashions hop from one mind to another with bewildering speed. Staying up to date with current ideas is a higher-order meme which probably does have some survival value. Knowing about A-Life, for instance, is very likely to increase your employability as well as your sexual attractiveness!

Note on “Life and Artificial Life”

Written 1992.

Appeared in the
Artificial life Lab
manual, Waite Group Press, 1993.

There are a number of very comprehensive anthologies of technical and semi-technical papers that have been presented at conferences on Artificial Life. The first conference was held at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1987, and its papers appear in C. Langton, ed.,
Artificial Life
, (Addison-Wesley, 1989). A good popular book on A-Life is: Steven Levy,
Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation
, (Pantheon Books, 1992).

I was employed as a “Mathenaut” in the Advanced Technical Division at Autodesk, Inc., from the August, 1988 to September, 1992. While I was there, I worked on
CA Lab
, on
James Gleick’s CHAOS: The Software
, on the
Autodesk Cyberspace Developer’s Kit
, and on a solo project with the working title Boppers. In 1992 Autodesk’s stock went down, and, as I mentioned earlier, they laid off many of the people in the Advanced Technical Division—including me. But they let me keep the rights to my Boppers code, and I got it published as a package called
Artificial Life Lab.
It’s out of print now, but the Boppers program, the Boppers source code and the complete
Artificial Life Lab
manual are available on my website.

I really enjoyed my time at Autodesk, but I wasn’t doing much writing while I was there. It was good to come back to the slower pace of academic life. By the end of my four years in the software industry pressure-cooker I felt a like an undercover agent who has forgotten his real identity and has started to believe his cover story. Regarding my return, I had a mental image of a jeep whining up a hill along a wire fence at some Iron Curtain border. The jeep stops, two men raise up a tightly wrapped canvas sack and throw it over the fence, the jeep speeds off. The long canvas bag twitches, unfolds, and there I am, back in the land of literature.